New Files Make American FactFinder Your One Stop for Key Census Bureau Data

The new AmericanFactFinder, the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics and information search engine introduced one year ago, has been updated with files formerly found in its “legacy” version. Users now have access to more than 60 important data sets in the new FactFinder English interface and 14 data sets in the Spanish interface.

“Users no longer have to navigate between two Web tools,” Census Bureau Director Robert Groves said. “They now have one stop for the most important data sets from the Census Bureau.”

Nearly all of the information from the older version has been uploaded to the new American FactFinder website. At your fingertips, you now will have access to more than 250 billion data cells and statistics for more than —

40,000 tables.

1,500 population groups and tribes

80,000 business and industry codes

12 million geographies for each decennial census

The new American FactFinder provides users with one-stop access to results from the decennial census (2010 and 2000), the economic census (2002 and 2007), American Community Survey, population estimates and key annual economic surveys. American FactFinder has statistics on a variety of topics, such as income, poverty, education, and housing.

Census staff are aware of customer issues with the new American Fact Finder and are working on both short term and long term solutions to address these issues, improve search and navigation, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Eventually, the 2010 Census Equal Employment Opportunity File, the American Housing Survey and the census of governments statistics will be released through the new American FactFinder.

This expansion has permitted the Census Bureau to retire the original version of American FactFinder on Jan. 20 after 12 years of service. Several files will be available only on the Census Bureau FTP (file transfer protocol) site.

Any deep links or bookmarks in the older version of American FactFinder no longer work.

The Census Bureau is holding a webinar today (see advisory for details) to discuss the transfer of files to the new American FactFinder and provide guidance on building deep links, searching and bookmarking in the new site, as well as accessing the information that had previously been on the legacy FactFinder through an archived FTP site. For those who cannot view and listen to the webinar live, an archived version will be available in the next few days.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.